In April 2018 – within The Comment Awards’ one year period of consideration for writing – Melanie Phillips wrote an extraordinary article encapsulating this ideology. In it, she threatened that the entire Muslim world would be “destroyed”.
The piece, written in the form of “an open letter to the Muslim world” (archived here) addresses all Muslims and ‘Islam’ as a homogenous bloc of barbarians comprising a wholesale obstacle and inherent threat, by its innate nature, to Western “progress and modernity” – by which the Muslim world will eventually be destroyed.
In this regard, there would be little if anything in the letter that Spencer and his ilk would disagree with (even Phillip’ staunch pro-Israel line would be endorsed by Spencer who supports Israel’s new nation-state law and sees Israel as an example of the kind of ‘ethno-state’ he wants to create in the US).
But Phillips’ writing is careful. Like Islamist hate preacher Anjem Choudary, whose public pronouncements meticulously incited to hatred but only barely within the letter of the law allowing him to continue for decades, Phillips’ language seems designed to be vague enough to slip into legal ‘acceptability’.
You people like killing Jews
The letter begins, “Dear Muslim world”, and moves rapidly into arguing that the entirety of the latter is engaged in a conspiratorial war on Western modernity aimed at destroying “the Jews”, particularly those trying to live in Israel. Phillips blames not Hamas, but the “Muslim world” as a whole for killing 26,000 Jews, including military casualties:
“More than 26,000 dead—with most of the military casualties consisting of Israel’s precious young who must be conscripted to defend their country—purely because there are people determined to prevent the Jews from living in their own ancestral homeland. But you know all about that because you are the people killing them.”
Note the language. The “Muslim world” is equated with a whole “people”, who are de facto culpable in trying to destroy the Jewish people:
“You are the people who have been trying to destroy the Jewish homeland for the better part of a century. Look how hard you’ve tried. You’ve used war. You’ve used terrorism. You’ve used the Palestinian Arabs as pawns. You’ve used the diplomatic game. You’ve used economic boycotts.”
You people have a culture of honour and shame
Phillips goes on, attributing to the “Muslim world” as a people an inherent anti-Semitism rooted not in violent extremism, but in core Islamic teachings—a view held by the likes of ISIS and endorsed by far-right zealots such as Spencer and Tommy Robinson. Not only that, but she insists that the Muslim people suffer wholesale from a “culture of honor and shame” which further reinforces this deep-rooted “hatred of the Jews” (for now, we will merely remark in passing that this flies in the face of the historical record and Islam’s most authentic theological readings):
“We understand why you hate Israel. Paranoid hatred of the Jews is embedded in your religious texts. Moreover, since you believe that any land ever occupied by Muslims becomes Muslim land in perpetuity—and since the very idea of the Jews being your equals in ruling their own land is anathema to you—your culture of honor and shame means that you cannot accept a Jewish state in a region you claim as your own.”
You people know that your religion is not about peace
Phillips goes on to equate her barbaric readings of Islam with a “holy war” being waged by the Muslim world on the West:
“For all the terrible violence and mayhem you have unleashed in the cause of Islamic holy war, your purpose is ultimately defensive. You realize that, in its freedom for the individual and particularly for women, modernity poses a mortal threat to Islam. Unlike the ignorant West, you know that Islam does not mean peace. It means submission. Modernity means submission can no longer be enforced. Which is why, in its seventh-century form at least, Islam is on the way out.”
You people want to destroy the Jews
She does pause to acknowledge that there are an “increasing number of the Arab young, who are on Twitter and Facebook” who “don’t want to fight the unending battles of the seventh century.” But she then goes on to racialise the Israel-Palestine conflict and demonise all Palestinians wholesale:
“Of course, none of this means the Palestinian Arabs are about to abandon their war to destroy Israel… But the unstoppable force of modernity is meeting the immoveable object of Islam, and modernity will win.”
The problem here is not with Phillips’ critiquing Islam. Even if she is completely wrong, which arguably she is, the problem is that she racialises her barbaric depiction of Islam by constructing Muslims – literally addressed as ‘you people’ – as largely intentional vehicles for this inherent barbarism:
“Which is why you believe you have to stop modernity. Which is why you are at war with the West. And which is also why you see the Jews as your enemy of enemies because you believe they are behind absolutely everything to do with modernity. Destroy the Jews, you imagine, and you will defeat modernity.”
But it’s okay because you people will be destroyed by Israel and Western modernity
She closes her piece with the following genocidal double threat:
“If you finally were to decide to end your war against us in Israel, finally decide that you love your children more than you hate us, finally decide that instead of trying to destroy Israel you want it to help you accommodate to modernity, you will find our hands extended in friendship. But if you try to remove us from the earth, we will destroy you.
Dear Muslim world, wake up and smell the coffee. The Jewish people has defied all the odds over and over again, and will continue to do so. You may break our hearts by killing our loved ones, but you won’t break us. Progress and modernity will destroy you instead.”
One threat is conditional and tangibly military (if the Muslim world doesn’t end the war on Israel, it will be destroyed by Israel); and the other is unconditional (either way, the Muslim world will be destroyed by Western progress). Read plainly, Phillips’ reference to both physical and cultural forms of destruction of the entire Muslim world has deeply unnerving and seemingly genocidal connotations.
Snowflakes
Imagine if I had written similar words as an ‘open letter to the Jewish world’, threatening that either Muslims would ‘destroy the Jewish world’ if it did not cease its war on Muslims, or ‘the Jewish world’ would be inevitably ‘destroyed’ by the advance of superior Muslim culture. I would be seen, rightly, as a not-so-closet Nazi.
For those that like to assume there are no consequences for such language, this is worth bearing in mind when considering that far-right terrorist Anders Breivik was an avid fan of Phillips, and quoted her approvingly in his manifesto.
Phillips is not doing journalism with pieces like this. She is simply spouting the same brand of bullshit that gives the Spencers, Robinsons and Breiviks of this world a hard on.
I’m not “offended” by this bullshit – I am maligned, marginalised and demonised by this bullshit.
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